CycleDog: (n) 1. An all-weather bicyclist, often regarded as one very sick puppy with a bad attitude. 2. A ankle-biting poodle with a Mohawk. (l)Canis
familiaris cyclus

Monday, August 24, 2009

I'm in that holiday mood once again

Yep. Halloween, that major religious holiday here in Oklahoma is creeping up on the sly. Oh, sure, the cicadas are singing their brains out, and it's still a hundred and forty-leven degrees outside with a relative humidity to match. The skeeters carried off one of the neighborhood kids. And ticks deflated our dog.

But I'm getting into that holiday mood, lemme tell ya.

Mary and I were in the library this afternoon, when the great god Yog Sothoth chose to leave a book from the children's section lying provocatively on the table where I sat. It was a young adult's book on zombies. And it fell open to this page, a still taken from the movie "Shaun of the Dead."

At first, I wondered if this was really just a documentary photo or one from a news magazine depicting a bunch of people waiting for the latest iPhone, perhaps. But no, they're zombies.

Then this little detail caught my eye.

What's this? There's a guy wearing cycling gloves, a cycling cap, and a jersey with some odd stripes on it. Odd stripes? Why, those are world championship stripes! These guys are trying to imply that ALL cyclists, regardless of their competition level, are a bunch of zombies! I won't have it I tell you! This has gone entirely too far!

We're called rude names by passing motorists. We endure the cold, the rain, and the wind because we love to travel on two wheels. We get little or no respect from the media, and now, we're being compared to zombies. It's simply too much. We are not flesh-eating brainless zombies!

I'm going to write a stiffly worded letter of complaint to both of our Senators from Oklahoma, despite the fast that they're both, um, brainless, and um, may be zombies too.

"An outbreak of zombies infecting humans is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead. While aggressive quarantine may eradicate the infection, this is unlikely to happen in practice. A cure would only result in some humans surviving the outbreak, although they will still coexist with zombies. Only sufficiently frequent attacks, with increasing force, will result in eradication, assuming the available resources can be mustered in time."

Thanks, Fritz. I saw that too since I have a compulsion about all things zombified, so it only primed me for finding that book on the library table. And, since the Big Holiday is coming up, I have to get cracking on a suitable tale for the occasion.